Quotes About Linguistics

Conversations in foreign languages don't linger in my head like they do in English. They don't last.

You don't realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don't have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense.

I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain.

New words travel from one variety of English to another and at a rapidly increasing rate, thanks to the way language is exchanged today over e-mail, chat rooms, TV, etc.

Almost any word can be drafted to serve as a verb, even words we think of as eternal and unchanging, stuck in their more traditional roles.

I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.

Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages.

The verb is relatively of much greater importance in an Indian tongue than in a civilized language.

One of the glories of English simplicity is the possibility of using the same word as noun and verb.

Sometimes you can do things with Spanish - like verbs and genders - easier than you can in English.

I spend my days kneeling in the muck of language, feeling around for gooey verbs, nouns, and modifiers that I can squash together to make a blob of a sentence that bears some likeness to reason and sense.

You can say now, 'I dissed him' - to diss, I dissed him - or, 'Stop dissing her'. And that's the interesting thing, that it's the prefix that's become the verb! It's a most remarkable development.

Of course, we have known for a long time that a word, like any verbal sign, is a unity of two components.

The Internet lets women use words, which is their natural tool. Little girls speak in more complex, grammatical sentences than little boys do, and women never lose that superiority in verbal ability.

'Constitutional' is just a real pip of a word. Positively rolls off the tongue. In fact, it's downright fun to say. 'Con-stit-too-shun-al.' It's the verbal equivalent of skipping down the street with an ice cream cone in your hand. It's like a semantic bag of Lays potato chips. You simply can't just say it once.

However, research in the years that followed found that in many of its important features, African American Vernacular English was becoming not less, but more different from other dialects.

Cantonese, which has up to nine tones as opposed to the five in Mandarin, is much more versatile and one of the richest dialects in Chinese.

lost. So the /p/ is in a way present, though not simply so. It is carried as a trace in the /b/, necessarily

I read on. Aramaic, like Hebrew, did not use vowels. Instead, you had to supply them yourself.

Everyone stared at me now. I'd studied linguistics a long time ago. A little philology too, the study of languages from analyzing texts. Mostly for the fun of it, but the subject came in useful sometimes. Ellis

Rhyme said, "'Game' is a noun. I don't accept it as a verb. But I will concede that many people use it. The Jargonites, I call them.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," which, Mr. Holcombe pointed out, contained every letter in the alphabet. I checked, and he turned out to be right.

German wasn't good for conversation because you had to wait to the end of the sentence for the verb, and so couldn't interrupt.

I am reminded that while New Yorkers say standing on line, the rest of the English-speaking world says standing in line.